TV Review: Paradox

All dramas send their characters on a journey. In Paradox (9pm, BBC1) it’s a brisk walk towards a cliff top.

In Tamzin Outhwaite’s nutty new sci-fi thriller, an ordinary copper goes from bog standard police work to investigating the future, in the space of a single shift.

It opens with DI Rebecca Flint, on a stakeout. Overhead, the Northern Lights are pinging around playfully in the skies. The Manchester skies.

Uh-oh.

Then it cuts to a beardy man in a darkened room, monitoring a big bank of screens.

Uh-uh-oh.

Turns out he’s a scientist.

Uh-uh-uh-oh. (Oh, let’s stop that now.)

There’s a bit of wobbly interference and suddenly he’s had an email from the future, with fragmented pictures of the aftermath of an unspecified calamity.

Get a load of this, he tells DI Flint, after ringing up the police and asking to speak to an intelligent detective (try that, next time you need the police, and see where it gets you).

In the blink of an eye, she’s discounted the probability that he’s been mucking around on Photoshop and launched an investigation into an explosion which hasn’t yet happened.

Happily, she’s not alone. Instead of ordering her to solve an outstanding burglary or two instead, her bosses on the Greater Manchester force assign her a team to help out.

Well, they’re used to unusual demands on their rota now.

In Life on Mars, they had a detective from the present, on secondment to the past.

Soon they’re piecing together the fragments of clues from photos and they’re searching for the spot where a lorry carrying flammable gas will hit a bridge with a train on top.

They get to the scene moments too late, after one of the team momentarily holds them up with an outbreak of cynicism.

Kaboom, goes the lorry, and the train. Actually, that bit was quite good, but the rest was utterly daft.

The plot was like something you’d get if you tried to complete a jigsaw using discarded pieces of Minority Report, 24, Spooks and FlashForward.

And the script was awful. “Where are these photos coming from?” DI Flint asked. “Aliens? God?”

Um ... Derek Acorah?

If you saw this in a cinema, after coughing up cash to get in, you’d pelt the screen with popcorn.

But TV is a little more forgiving. So let’s be kind. Paradox has done the hard work: establishing that a Manchester rozzer probes tomorrow. Maybe it will get better now.

After all, who’d have thought there was hope for a series about a bloke spinning through space in a police box?

*The Merc’s inflexible TV page deadline forbids reviews of live shows, so here’s a belated thought on Jordan’s farewell to I’m A Celebrity: she looked like the kind of thing your auntie used to bring back from Spain as a souvenir.